College Students Don't Know How to Study
It's no surprise that college students don't know how to study. Many K-12 students don't know how to study. That just confirms all the more why many of have chosen to homeschool. In addition to the many advantages, we get to emphasize independent thinking, consequences and motivation at any grade. Those are the life skills that support 'study skills'.
By Valerie Strauss
"It’s incredible that students could have made it through 12 years of school without learning how to study and plan their time, and with a fragile sense of themselves as students. More incredible, the problem is not limited to struggling undergraduates; the studies I’ve described were conducted at elite schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Clearly, one solution is retention programs in higher education that better target the reasons that students leave school. But why wait until students are in college? These issues could be addressed in middle or high school. There are likely two reasons they are not, and each calls for a different solution.
First, if K-12 educators are to impart this knowledge to students, they must know the research findings themselves, as these practical solutions can run counter to intuition. The U.S. Department of Education has attempted to disseminate research findings, but has had limited success. The teacher’s unions would be better choices. As associations of practitioners, they have credibility with educators, and in-house expertise to make research findings practical in classrooms. As yet, however, the unions have shown little interest in this work.
Second, even if teachers know about these research findings, teaching them to children could easily fall between the cracks. Study skills and planning don’t obviously belong to the English teacher, the math teacher or anyone. Further, there’s not a distinct time that it become relevant, as does, for example, driver’s education. Teaching this content will require curricular planning, and that is most likely to be successful at the district level, where other curricular decisions are made.
Policymakers’ focus on the high cost of college is understandable, as tuition has grown excessive. But addressing that problem will take time and the resolution of conflicting interests. Meanwhile, methods to help ensure students get their money’s worth are available and cheap, and it would be bad planning indeed not to take advantage of them."
